(2020) Cinder Well - No Summer    


Review:
Living near a Catholic church in a small town in  County Clare, Cinder Well is California-born Amelia Baker who, influenced by having toured with Lankum,  moved from America to study Irish music, this being her third album exploring her brand of doom folk. Recorded in Washington, in a studio in a converted church, produced by Nich Wilbur and sparsely arranged with only violin and viola completing her on guitar, organ and fiddle, it juxtaposes her own material with interpretations of traditional Appalachian folk tunes, predominantly from a  female perspective. Accompanied by drone, it’s one such tune that opens the album, Wandering Boy, not the number associated with The Carter Family and Doc Watson, but rather an old Baptist songbook number about memories of the narrator’s mother, learnt from Kentucky banjo player Roscoe Holcomb of Daisy, Kentucky, with Baker adding a final verse of her own. Referencing the church bell back home that strikes on the hour, every hour, the simply plucked, forlornly sung title track, somewhat prescient of the pandemic, would seem to play on a theme of an unconsummated longing (“spent the whole year staring at the ring on your finger”) in the shadow of the steeple (“listening to him sing in a language I don’t understand”). County Clare is also the backdrop to the nine-minute epic Our Lady’s,  a spare, banjo and keyboard-backed largely instrumental ballad written from the perspective of an abandoned “cold and cinder block” mental asylum in Ennis, not far from her home, which, “home to the chefs and thieves/And the drunks, and the babies out of wedlock”, operated from 1856 until 2002, the lyrics drawing on stories of those it housed and the effect of silence where “a blank wall can destroy you”. Revisited from her self-titled 2015 mini album debut, Fallen was written some ten years back during a  spell living in a cabin in Alaska, the minimalist acoustic guitar, strings and vocal performance evoking isolation and unease as she sings “Oh, my body alone”. It’s back to traditional material then for a familiar staple in The Cuckoo,  learnt from Jean Ritchie, and played in a more restrained and sober manner than is often the case, resonant electric guitar substituting the more common banjo, directing the focus on the lyrics. A late addition to the planned tracklisting, the relatively sprightly Old Enough was put down subsequent to the original recordings and features string players Mae Kessler and Marit Schmitt harmonising on backing vocals, an ode to ageing and experience, the lyrics (“I am golden in the evening/we are bolder in the morning/and the long grass, it is grown, over the steps of the door”) loosely based on Irish ballad Sweet Iniscarra. Featuring Baker on fiddle, moving from mournful to celebratory notes, the instrumental Queen of the Earth, Child of the Skies is   an American variation of an Irish set dance called The Blackbird, this interpretation derived from a 1947 field recording of West Virginian fiddler Eden Hammons. Conjuring the idea of transition, a 47-second sample of wind/waves, The Doorway gives way to the final five-minute track, the simply strummed From Behind The Curtain, an imagined (but clearly personal) letter home to a loved one who came before her as she sings “I write to you to tell you where I live now/It is a small town, in the west/There are three corners that encompass it all/the asylum, the pub, and the catholic church”, introducing a note of tragedy (“I know your father shot himself and you were not told”) as the song builds, observing that “the sky is lavender in Los Angeles, and it is darkening in County Clare” as she ends writing of how she’ll “stop at the way home from the bar/to listen to the wind/because it sounds like the waves in California”. Dark and yet cleansing, the skies of which Cinder Well sings may be overcast but, just as there is joy in the deserted asylum, in the stillness of Sundays, there is a light that shines through ‘No Summer’ that warms the chill in the soul. — folkradio.co.uk


 


Track List:
01 - Wandering Boy
02 - No Summer
03 - Our Lady's
04 - Fallen
05 - The Cuckoo
06 - Old Enough
07 - Queen of the Earth, Child of the Skies
08 - The Doorway
09 - From Behind the Curtain


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Country: USA
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)


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